Wednesday, March 26, 2014

How To Be the Grad Student Your Advisor Brags About

Your advisor is ridiculously busy - so how do you get her to keep track of all
the awesome research you are doing? Short answer: do great work that has
such high online visibility, she can’t ignore it.

Easy, right?
But if you’re like me, you actually might appreciate a
primer on how to maximize and document your research’s impact. Here,
I’ve compiled a guide to get you started.

1. Do great work

To begin with, you need to do work that’s worth bragging about. Self-promotion and great metrics don’t amount to much if your research isn’t sound.

2. Increase your work’s visibility

Assuming that you’ve got that under control, making your
“hidden” work visible is an easy next step. Gather the conference
posters, software code, data, and other research products that have been
sitting on your hard drive.

Using Figshare, you can upload datasets and make them findable online. You can do the same for your software using GitHub, and for your slide decks using Slideshare.

Want to make your work popular? Consider licensing it
openly. Open licenses like CC-BY allow others to reuse your work more
easily, advancing science quickly while still giving you credit. Here
are some guides to help you license your data, code, and papers.

Making your work openly available has the benefit of
allowing others to reuse and repurpose your findings in new and
unexpected ways - adding to the number of citations you could potentially
receive.

These sites can also report metrics that allow you to see often
they are viewed, downloaded, and used in other ways (more about that
later).

3. Raise your own profile by joining the conversation

Informal exchanges are the heart of scientific communication,
but formal “conversations” like written responses to journal articles
are also important. Here are three steps to raising your profile.

Engage others in formal forums. You may
already participate in conversations in your field at conferences and in
the literature. If you do not, you should. Presenting posters, in
particular, can be a helpful way to get feedback on your work while at
the same time getting to know others in your field in a professional
context.

Engage others more and often. Don’t be a
wallflower, online nor off. Though it can be intimidating to chat up
senior researchers in your field - or even other grad students, for that
matter - it’s a necessary step to building a community of collaborators.
An easy way to start is by joining the Web equivalent of a ‘water
cooler’ conversation: Twitter. There are lots ofgreat guides to helpyou get started (PDF). When you’ve gained some confidence and have longform insights to add, start a blog to share your thoughts. This post offers great tips on academic blogging for beginners, as does this article.

Engage others in the open. Conversations
that happen via email only serve those who are on the email chain. Two
great places to have conversations that can benefit anyone who chooses
to listen - while also getting you some name recognition–are disciplinary
listservs and Twitter. Open engagement also lets others to join the
debate.

4. Know your impact: track your work’s use online

Once you’ve made your contributions to your discipline more
visible, track the ways that your work is being used and discussed by
others online.

There are great tools that can help: the Altmetric.com
bookmarklet, Academia.edu’s visualization dashboard, Mendeley’s Social
Statistics summaries, basic metrics on Figshare, Github, and Slideshare,
and Impactstory profiles.

See the buzz around articles with the Altmetric.com bookmarklet

The Altmetric.com bookmarklet
can help you understand the reach of a particular article. Where
altmetrics aren’t already displayed on a journal’s website, you can use
the bookmarklet.

Drag and drop the Altmetric bookmarklet (available here)
into your browser toolbar, and then click it next time you’re looking
at an article on a publisher’s website. You’ll get a summary of any buzz
around your article - tweets, blog posts, mentions in the press, even
Reddit discussions.

In addition to a tidy summary of pageviews and referral sources for
your documents hosted on their site, they also offer a great map
visualization, which can help you to easily see the international reach
of your work.

This tool can be especially helpful for those in applied,
internationally-focused research - for example, Swedish public health
researchers studying the spread of disease in Venezuela - to understand
the consumption of articles, white papers, and policy documents hosted
on Academia.edu.

One important limitation is that it doesn’t cover
documents hosted elsewhere on the web.

Understand who’s reading your work with Mendeley Social Statistics

Mendeley’s Social Statistics summaries
can also help you understand what type of scholars are reading your
research, and where they are located. Are they faculty or graduate
students? Do they consider themselves biologists, educators, or social
scientists?

If you’re writing about quantum mechanics, your advisor will
be thrilled to see you have many “Faculty” readers in the field of
Physics. Like Academia.edu visualizations, Mendeley’s Social Statistics
are only available for content hosted on Mendeley.com.

Go beyond the article: track impact for your data, slides, and code

The services above work well for research articles, but
what about your data, slides, and code? Luckily, Figshare, Slideshare,
and Github (which we discussed in Step 2) track impact in addition to
hosting content.

To track your data’s impact, get to know Figshare’s basic social sharing statistics (Twitter, Google+, and Facebook), which are displayed alongside pageviews and cites.

To understand how others are using your presentations, use Slideshare’s metrics for slide decks. Impact is broken down into three categories: Views, Actions, and Embeds.

For code, leverage Githubsocial functionalities. Stars indicate if others have bookmarked your projects, and Forks allow you to see if others are reusing your code.

Put it all together with Impactstory

So, there are many great places to discover your impact.
Too many, in fact: it’s tough to visit all these individually, and tough
to see and share an overall picture of your impact that way.

An Impactstory profile
can help. Impactstory compiles information from across the Web on how
often people view, cite, reuse, and share your journal articles,
datasets, software code, and other research outputs.

Send your advisor a
link to your Impactstory profile and include it in your annual
review - she’ll be impressed when reminded of all the work you’ve done
(that software package she had forgotten about!) and all the attention
your work is getting online (who knew your code gets such buzz!).

Congrats! You’re on your way

You’re an awesome researcher who has lots of online
visibility. Citations to your work have increased, now that you have
name recognition and your work can more easily be found and reused.

You’re tracking your impact regularly, and have a better understanding
of your audience to show for it. Most importantly, you’re officially
brag-worthy.

Are there tips I didn’t cover here that you’d like to share? Tell us in the comments.

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ABOUT ME

Dr Robert Muller is an experienced, and well-published author, teacher and researcher who has been teaching and conducting research in Sociology, Criminology, Politics and Public Health in the university sector since 1993. In addition, Robert has been teaching English as a Second Language (ESL) since 1984 in a range of different cultures, including Turkey, Italy, England, and Australia.